Book Review: Hope is the First Dose

When my library listed this on their recent acquisitions, I knew I had to read it. Hope is the First Dose: A Treatment Plan for Recovering from Trauma, Tragedy, and Other Massive Things should be mandatory reading for anyone reeling from great losses or traumatic life events. As I read, I kept wishing I owned the book so I could highlight and underline key passages. Instead, I settled for sticky notes on pages I wanted to revisit.

Dr. W. Lee Warren is a neurosurgeon. He explains things with precision and ease. Plus, he knows trauma and what happens when you endure TMT, The Massive Thing, that disrupts your life. Someone stabbed Warren's 19-year-old son to death. This trauma left him struggling to maintain a peaceful equilibrium. He spends much of the book analyzing how trauma disrupts life and why we react the way we do. He talks about how he had always believed "that if I tried to live a good life, God would come through for me. Losing a son was the first time God had seemed to say, 'Here's a situation you can't control or prevent with good behavior, and you can't undo it or fix it.'" This propelled him into dark spaces where he would revisit the pain and trauma (how I can relate!).

Dr. Warren outlines the four paths people take after experiencing trauma in whatever form (an unexpected diagnosis, a marital loss, whatever sends you reeling): Untouchables (endure readily), Climbers (begin discouraged, but climb to resilience), Dippers (start high, but hit valleys, and resume), and Crashers (those who burnout because of their loss or trauma). Whatever your path, TMTs will change you. As he expresses it, you might climb out of the furnace of suffering to escape the fire, but you will still smell like smoke. You want to make the TMT a thing in your life, not the thing in your life.

As Warren discusses insights from Lamentations, he gives a nod to another favorite book of mine, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, by Mark Vroegop. Next, he examines the psalms of Asaph and David. He recognizes that they "acknowledged the darkness while [they] waited for the dawn." Or in another Mark Vroegop quote, "Hope springs from truth rehearsed." Throughout this exposition, Warren is reminding you that you must retrain (or as he puts it, do self-surgery) your brain. You can choose to focus on the trauma and the hopelessness, but it will cause you to spiral. You must rehearse the truth of God's promises and destroy the lies your own brain wants to tell you about your situation. For his treatment plan, he suggests prehab, self-brain surgery, then rehab. But hope is the first and most potent dose!